Salt Modern Voices Interview 2: Lee Smith

Salt Modern Voices are a series of poetry and fiction pamphlets published by Salt Publishing. This Autumn, several of its authors will be touring the UK and reading in various venues. More info on this can be found on the website. In the lead up to the tour, SMV authors will be interviewing each other and posting the results on their personal websites. In the first of these, Lee Smith and Claire Trévien interview JT Welsch on form, masculinity, and his American heritage.

Interview with Lee Smith

In the second interview, made available here for the first time, questions from Claire Trévien, Mark Burnhope and Adrian Slatcher have been asked of Lee Smith, whose collection "Away from the City" was No.1 in the Salt Modern Voices series. Growing out of an exhibition of photography and poetry, the collection explores not just connections between written and visual arts, and also the two cities, Melbourne and Cambridge, where he has lived, and where the poems were written.

A lot of your poems seem rather minimal. When they're not 'short', they often consist of taut, clipped lines, or short numbered sections. One of them is a haibun. There are photographs included in the collection too, which add to a kind of 'travel journal' feel, where these elements might be collected together to chart a journey. Do you see visuals as an inherent part of your practice? Could you tell us something about your composition and organising principles?

Away from the City is indeed a travel journal, an account of a year spent in two cities. I wanted the poems to form a series of images, short instances of emotion, movement, or even nothingness, that transport the reader through these urban environments. This journey is very much a visual experience. The photographs create an atmosphere within which the poems emerge. This process reflects how many of the poems were written - observing and capturing visual exchanges, and then interpreting these elements in poetic form. I can't write long poems. The images get lost in the writing. I don't have a huge attention span, so the more immediate these observations are, the more they are allowed to resonate.


The title seems deliberately misleading considering the predominance of urbanity in these poems, but then as one realizes that it's a tale of two cities, it seems perhaps as if the title captures that sense one has when 'belonging' to two places: of always missing one when with the other. Did you write your Cambridge poems in Melbourne and vice versa, or where they done in situ?

The title does hint at that sense of belonging in two places. Indeed I did write some Cambridge poems in Melbourne, and vice versa — which led to a number of interesting links between different poems. I think the title also tries to convey the feeling of movement in the series as a whole. I felt sometimes that by merely walking and observing the people who inhabit the city, I was moving further away from it.

We're used to a "transatlantic" language writing between Europe and America, I wonder to what extent you felt you had to choose or develop a "trans-pacific" language to write about two such distant, and distinct cities as Cambridge and Melbourne. There seems a consistency in your writing between the two places, but its quite impressionistic - as if you're seeing both the new and familiar for the first time. To what extent was this deliberate?

When I first began writing these poems in Melbourne, I had been there a number of times previously. I was familiar with most of the city, but I still felt like a tourist every time I returned. I tried to harness these feelings of alienation, but apply them to local, everyday situations. Perhaps it's this element of alienation that ties the language of the two cities together. Or it may be that influences on my own dialect had seeped through when writing this series — I felt very strongly connected to Melbourne after I returned to Cambridge.

I like art/text collaborations - for you was this always an important element what you wanted to do? I'm interested in how the exhibition, and then the pamphlet emerged, and whether you had to write within those constraints, or found this enabling?

The collaboration with photography was an essential element in the germination of this book. I felt inspired by the way that these two cities had very clear visual identities (architecture, fashion, business etc.) and the power that photography has to capture poetic visual images. The original exhibition of Away from the City contained 24 photographs, and only eight poems. I wanted to experiment with the way that people navigated around the images and text, and what parallels they would draw between them.

With the pamphlet, I constrained myself to including only twelve poems from each city. Here I wanted the images created by the poetry to be in the foreground. The choice of using only eight photographs was a difficult one, and perhaps I would choose eight different ones for a new edition.

I'm just interested in what other poetry you like/read - particularly given that you must have come across a lot working for Salt. I published some of Chris McCabe's early poems for instance in Lamport Court, and his approach to how the poems look on the page, as well as the kind of short poems he does, seems to have something in common with your work. Did the Salt list/or particularly other poets feed into your work is it something in parallel?

Working for Salt obviously exposed me to a huge array of contemporary styles. And to an extent, I guess editing and typesetting the Salt list allowed me a broader knowledge of the range of poetry being published. I remember, not long after joining, reading Luke Kennard's The Solex Brothers and thinking how completely different it was from anything I had studied at university. It encouraged me to experiment with style, and I remember writing many more prose poems after reading that book.

I've tried hard not to emulate poets that I enjoy reading. It spoils my experience of their poetry. However, looking back on the poems now, I can see elements of Matthew Sweeney, Tobias Hill, Bashō. I believe I first read McCabe's work after writing Away from the City.

On the whole, I'd rather remove myself from style comparisons and influences. My fear is for a reader who stops mid-way through one of my poems (or anyone else's) to consider who the poet has been influenced by.

I believe you're returning to Melbourne. Where next for your artistic practice then?

I've just invested in a new camera, so more photography/poetry collaborations. I want to experiment more with exhibitions and digital. There may be room for a 'spin-off' pamphlet, but I certainly couldn't manage a full collection.

Melbourne's a perfect place to develop the visual aspect of my writing. Also, I'm looking forward to having a huge range of creative artists (music, art, design) to collaborate with. The poetry community in Melbourne is very different to the UK. I like the idea of not having to conform to a particular school/publisher, developing new audiences, and generally not being outcast by an antiquated poetry establishment.

Writers Need Publishers

Imagine, for an instance, if the Tate, Tate Modern, and National Gallery, alongside every other publicly funded gallery in the country closed down because of lack of funding. It wouldn't just be an outcry about the philistine nature of our society, failing to show due care with its national assets, but a cry about the nature of the future: asking where our artists - one of the country's key "creative assets" - would be shown in the future? The art economy that makes a Damian Hirst worth millions, and a rich man, begins in many ways with a range of public subsidies, not all to Hirst of course. It's the same with theatre, and with classical music. But literature, the one art form that we are not just curators of the world's best, but historically, the world's finest, remains left to its own devices.

Writers need publishers, because they also need readerships. It is not Gilbert & George in their East End studio visited by some curious art fans that made them on the world stage, but major exhibitions in our public galleries. The publishing infrastructure is different... perhaps because it is by necessity distributed, and perhaps because, in its curation of the word, its somehow got mangled with the newspaper industry, its primarily a commercially driven world. Yet though it has been this way since the mass market book became possible, the world of gentlemen publishers mixing commercial hits with critical beliefs is long gone. If 90% of novels don't make money, then the publishers could of course just publish the 10% - but of course they'd then have less turnover, no need for staff, in fact, very little need to be publishers. They could just be fulfilment houses for Dan Brown and Stephen King.

It is the little publishers, who, over the last few years, with technology costs coming down, and the big publishers throwing up their hands in confusion at what might be "good literature", who have shown a massive energy. Yet, same as with CDs and DVDs, there's a declining market. Salt Publishing, coming to the end of an Arts Council grant, have found this underpinning vital to their business. Whatever you think of their business model - too many books perhaps, a diversity of authors that its hard to get your head around, concentration on the notoriously low-selling fields of poetry, short stories and lit. crit - their books have been always been lovely items, their literary aesthetic high, and their use of new technologies ahead of the game. A fall off in sales - part economic recession perhaps? partly operating in a falling markeT? - threatens the whole press. Their "Just one book" campaign a reminder that fans of the press who've maybe not bought from them for a while, might want to have a look. Like the Polar bear, once they're gone, they're gone.

But it takes me back to my initial point. Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery would no doubt get good jobs in the commercial publishing industry, or, as likely, as ambassadors for literature/publishing paid out of the public purse. Yet, the thing that writers need more than another creative writing course, another Arvon weekend, are stable entry points - publishers, magazines, and events - where there is an opportunity to be put before the public. Literature is the cinderella of our subsidised arts, yet this week the BBC is running a "poetry" season which I would guess probably cost more money than the poetry budget of the Arts council this year. Writers don't need buildings; we don't need our Tate Modern or National Theatre or Bridgewater Hall. But we do need places for our work to exist; whether its a magazine or on a publishers list.

UPDATE: Chris Hamilton Emery's blog about the campaign so far, and why it was necessary.

(It can't help me think how difficult it is to keep any sort of creative infrastructure in this country without some public funding. Not necessarily of writers and publishers themselves, but by embedding them or supporting them from larger institutions.)

Poetry Prizes

My uncharacteristic silence the last week or two has its usual reasons...alcohol and Christmas. After managing around half a dozen parties since my last post, its amazing I've still got any of the braincells required for writing this occasional blog. Poetry prizes come in all shapes and sizes and I'm generally no fan of them, after all its hardly a competitive sport is it?

Yet I have to say I can only applaud the innovation of the online poetry slam that Poetry Republic have set up in support of the Mines Advisory Group charity. Judging is by the entrants - and the winner will be announced as part of the "not part of" Manchester International Festival fringe next summer.

And although, as an unsuccessful entrant, I should be a little down today after not making the shortlist for Salt Publishing's inaugural Crashaw Prize, I'm far more intrigued by the six shortlisted writers, who'll have their books published internationally, and knowing Salt, very handsomely, in the next few months. A quick Google search shows that these are all poets with a little bit of a track record; a sign perhaps that the "slush pile" is not made up the mad and hopeless, but the hardworking, the worthy, the progressive, the comming. From my own perspective, even the discipline to enter the competition - i.e. putting together a 70 page collection - was a valuable one.